open fire hydrants, open eyes

You become more aware of your body when someone touches it, calls attention to its physicalness with even, say, just a hug. The touch of something to your skin, something for you to push back inwards against, allows you to observe that you are bound by this human body, that you are nothing more. Your mind for a moment becomes at peace because it recognizes and accepts where it is, inside this mass of flesh, aware of its boundaries, happy with that awareness. A colony's outlines are traced out on a map and you look at the map, happy to see the thing demarcated, its existence more validated now that its outlines can be traced, its borders pointed to.

In the summer, I know where my body ends. In heat like this, thick and beautifully oppressive, the heavy stuff in which movements are harder through, more labored, I know that I am a human body. I know my body's limits and am more aware of the world my body exists in. I also know the thing this body is a piece of. I am aware of this air, these elements, that my body inhabits, a little dot in some massive thing. I like the flirtation with the air that happens in the summer. It's a tease, a physical tease, that makes me absolutely ravenous when I encounter attractive men in public these days. The weather and its touch has me in a constant state of heightened physicality, so that when thoughts of sex come, which they do way more often in this weather, they come on with such an intensity and a force that is far less restrained than usual - no wariness about exposure of various forms, about putting oneself at risk for rejection. Because there is none. There is no such thing. Someone can turn down your advances and you are still going out on to that hot street at the end of the night where that air just sits against your skin, and the feeling of that is a physical sensation that has pleasures all its own that rival the pleasures of a great deal of sexual encounters.

What am I saying is that I love summer, this particular type of weather happening right now, this heat wave of days in the mid-90s. I love how it affects my mood, how it affects your mood, how it affects the mood of the general populace of this city. We become a Southern Gothic novel. There is an undercurrent of sex and rage just below the surface of the air, its heaviness barely keeping our desires in check. I love seeing families sitting on their stoops at 11pm. I love that children in the city never seem to sleep in the summer and are out running through sprinklers at all hours of the night. We are all out for fun, for the joys this life is capable of providing, and in weather like this we are less restrained about admitting these things, chasing after those joys.

I jerked off with the hot exhibitionist guy that goes to my gym that I have developed a huge erotic attraction to. I finally told him that I wanted to mess around with him outside the gym sometime. He told me his name, said he would give me his card. In the steam room, the heat sought indoors even, that weather-induced delirium, I quickly came, so turned on by this guy. He saw me come and he quickly put his head back on my dick to eat the come. I think one of my co-workers witnessed a bit of this encounter, certainly knows I was jerking off with this guy in the shower stalls and then in the steam room. And the little with which I care that some co-worker I don't particularly like most likely saw me jerking off in the locker room with some muscle daddy is because of this weather. This weather makes me give zero fucks.

I have looked at some men shamelessly on the train the last few days, have really given into these erotic impulses I have been having. Because there's not that much to lose by letting a guy see you looking at him, because eye contact is fun, because I am this bit of skin and the way this mass of flesh talks, lives, is through touch, and it likes being alive (which is to say, I like being alive) and so it keeps on living, keeps on seeking out other bits of skin that want to be alive together for a while.